HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA: A JOURNEY OF CONSCIENCE

Published: April 16, 1989

(Page 2 of 5)

''They searched me at the Beijing airport,'' I explained. ''I wasn't expecting it. Later, I was interrogated at the Public Security Bureau. They asked me about you.'' Lu had not heard of that. I went ahead with a kind of apology I had been waiting years to make.

''It was careless of me to allow myself to be found with that letter in my possession,'' I said. ''I don't know if it contributed to your imprisonment or if they would have gotten you without it, but I have wanted for a long time to tell you that, if it hurt you, I'm extremely sorry.''

Lu Lin and I stood a bit awkwardly together under the lengthening shadows of a late Beijing afternoon. I was aware of the sound of bicycle bells drifting across from the street nearby. The air was chilly and filled with the odor of coal bricks burning in neighborhood stoves. Lu's eyes were moist. Perhaps it was the sting of the cold, dusty air. I fought back tears. Lu Lin waved his hand dismissively and looked into the distance. ''Mei shi,'' he said. ''It's nothing.''

IT IS OFTEN IN THE SMALL THINGS OF LIFE, THE everyday details, that change is best noticed. My trip to Beijing last December - the first since I left China at the end of 1982 - was, from a personal standpoint, unusual from the moment I made arrangements to travel there. I picked up a visa without difficulty in Paris, not notifying the Chinese authorities in advance, not contacting them after I got there. Ten or seven years ago, you couldn't get a visa to China without official sponsorship by a Chinese organization, certainly not if you were a journalist.

My plan was to visit my old friends in the Chinese capital. The mood in China had supposedly relaxed a good deal during the years I had been away, and I thought the time was right to measure how much things had changed.

Still, when I arrived in Beijing, I was not at all counting on seeing Lu Lin. I assumed that, as a former political prisoner, he would hesitate to meet a foreign reporter. He had had trouble enough already. And so, for my first few days, I visited writers, some painter friends, a teacher or two. I paid a call on Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who is China's leading human rights advocate these days. He is a man who, as a scientist of international renown, is in the forefront of a group of Chinese intellectuals calling for the release of all political prisoners.

I also saw Ren Wanding, a once-jailed dissident. Ren came to the sleek lobby of the Jianguo Hotel where I was staying. He would never have come to a foreigner's hotel in the old days. A security guard would have made him register his name, which would have been sent along to the Public Security Bureau. Ren had recently become the first of the former Democracy Wall dissidents to resume a degree of activity. He had been interviewed for a story that appeared on page 1 of this newspaper; an article of his, advocating greater freedom in China, had been published on The Times's Op-Ed page - all of that without any apparent reaction from the Chinese authorities. And so, my impression was that the clenched fist of political control had been relaxed, at least somewhat.

Among the friends I looked up early on in my Beijing visit were Yang Yiping and Li Yongcun, two painters and members of the Stars Exhibition Group, a decade-old unofficial artists' association. The group was well known in China during the Democracy Wall period and its members had even held two public exhibitions of their work. But, in fact, the painters weren't political dissidents in the way Lu Lin and Ren Wanding were. They merely wanted to paint outside the restrictions of ''socialist'' art.

Li Yongcun, for example, was political only in that his somber, melancholy landscapes, his dark villages brooding under heavy skies, were devoid of the optimism required by the canons of Socialist Realism.

Once, in 1982, I went to see him at his home in the eastern part of the city, forgetting to take the precaution of parking my car, with its conspicuous foreigner's license plates, a good 100 or so yards from his door. After the visit, when Li walked me out of the house to the car, he was suddenly surrounded by a group of militiamen, who curtly asked him who I was and what I was doing there. Li signaled me to leave, which I did, horrified that my lapse might have landed him in serious trouble. Later, he told me he had been interrogated until the early hours of the morning about our friendship and what we had discussed.

This time, I visited Li Yongcun in his house just as I might pay a call on a friend in New York. And he came to the hotel a few times to pick me up in his own car, bought with the proceeds of sales of his paintings. This was also something he couldn't have done in the past: sustain a career as an independent artist. Furthermore, Li has traveled abroad - to Japan, France, the United States - in order to visit museums and attend exhibitions of his work. But it was the car that impressed me most, a little, cramped Fiat, made in Poland. It had cost him $3,000. I thought how odd and wonderful that Li Yongcun, a self-employed artist who paints under the name Bo Yun, could take me to see the sights in his own car. Before, only foreigners had been allowed to own cars.